Hegemony Of The Video Game Industry – Part 1/2

If you know the story

You know

It’s about love

It’s about family

It’s about friendship

It’s about wonder

It’s about sacrifice

It’s about adventure

It’s about courage

It’s about skill

It’s about action

It’s about celebration

It’s about teamwork

It’s about fantasy

It’s about fear

It’s about justice

It’s about legends

It’s about fastballs

It’s about hustle

It’s about homeruns

It’s about resisting

It’s about soul

It’s about infamy

It’s about companionship

It’s about expression

It’s about mayhem

It’s about nostalgia

It’s about creativity

It’s about honor

It’s about chaos

It’s about exploration

It’s about rythm

It’s about competition

It’s about resolve

It’s about velocity

It’s about mischief

It’s about sneaking

It’s about intensity

It’s about freedom

It’s about connection

It’s about heroics

It’s about joy

It’s about drive

It’s about persistence

It’s about – you

Thank you

For 30 years of play

Against a backdrop of games that made the brand famous, here is the little prose poem that Sony treated us to in a video on December 2, 2024, celebrating PlayStation’s 30th anniversary. A month earlier, the company had already offered a whole range of consoles and accessories in the colors of the PSOne – a legendary machine! But it doesn’t stop there: an entire page is dedicated to the event and the products deriving from it.

Popular fervor, digital queues, moments of joy! Sometimes even filled with pride: “I got everything! Playstation 5 Pro, DualSense controller, and Playstation Portal!”; or relief: “Phew! I managed to get at least one controller!” But also moments of disappointment: “I got nothing, despite being in the queue since the opening”; and resentment: “Why make a limited edition and not allow everyone to join the party!”. What fascinates me about these moments is that they crystallize and testify to something quite deep in our relationship with video games.

They are symptoms of a certain history, a certain conception of the nature of the medium, and very particular emotional investments at the heart of the video game production and consumption field.

What interests me in these moments is this irresistible desire to be part of the celebration. This celebration, which was eagerly awaited, just as we regularly anticipate the “anniversary” dates of certain iconic series, events, or brands. These are grand moments of emphasis where the industry and consumers meet in an ostentatious emotional mode. It is often an opportunity for a strange game of gift and counter-gift: it is reminded that without the players, certain series or brands wouldn’t be where they are, etc. But it’s always to better remind them that without the brand or series in question, they wouldn’t be here; at least not as they are, not in this way. It’s an opportunity to remind us that PlayStation or Nintendo changed our lives. In short, it’s weaving a certain narrative.

The Video Game Industry

Video games are young. They are not even 70 years old. Yet, most of those who today play or talk about video games in one way or another have not witnessed its beginnings. Most of us have inherited a certain state of the video game world that crystallized relatively early in its history: the video game industry. This early crystallization has had and continues to have significant effects: on creators, players, journalists, influencers, editors, politicians, and even researchers.

When we talk about video games, we notice that for most people, it becomes synonymous with its industry, that is, with commercial video games. Talking about video games is talking about a set of games and creative practices that are relatively homogeneous. In saying this, I do not make a fundamental distinction between AAA games, the so-called “indie” scene, or even this somewhat particular space of mobile games, compared to the first two. All three still fall within what we will call commercial games: they are created to be sold at a certain price to generate profits. This part of the video game world is the one that attracts all the attention, it is the one we talk about endlessly. It is the one that some proudly claim is now the “world’s largest cultural industry.” All non-commercial video games are gently erased, set aside, ignored. Within the very world of video games, composed of all the agents moving around the game in one way or another, indifference reigns. It’s ultimately a tiny minority who has an eye on what might be happening behind the industry, or rather on its margins. Personally, I do not consider myself part of this minority.

I would like to revisit how the video game world has taken the form it has today and at the same time, how the belief (and the concomitant practices) of the industry as the sole producer and true actor of video games has been shaped.

The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist

In his book, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist, Brendan Keogh focuses on video game production in Australia. His work is based on a series of discussions with various figures in this field. He quickly notices that the answers to the question “Are you a video game creator?” are often complex. Few of the interviewees identify as true players in the video game world. And indeed, the Australian scene has some particularities that make it an especially interesting area of study. Due to its geographical isolation, Australia is not a territory that has been particularly invested by major game development studios. But above all, the global financial crisis that began in 2008 had a significant impact on Australian video game creation. Not less than two-thirds of the jobs in video game production disappeared at that time. As a result, the early 2010s saw a reconfiguration of the Australian video game production space: a production space much more informal than what we generally imagine when we talk about video games. The actors are often positioned across various fields, the studios are often small, and so on.

It is this spectacle that forces Keogh to change his perspective: the video game industry (or rather an industry) is in constant, open, and essential contact with what is not part of it. As everywhere, but particularly manifest here, the term “industry” proves too narrow to account for the realm of video game production. It is precisely this term “realm,” borrowed from Bourdieu, that Keogh prefers over “industry” to describe the reality of the video game production world.

The term “industry” raises a set of central issues: it crystallizes and fetishizes a historical formation of production, circulation, and consumption and presents it as an ideal type. Its so-called unified character is also misleading: within what we call the industry, we actually find various ways of producing and different relationships to production. In short, the term “industry,” or at least the focus placed on it, is problematic because it acts as a cover for a whole section of the video game field. By tending to normalize this historical form of production, discourses on “industry” tend to erase the complexity of relationships within the field.

In this respect, even a critical use of the term, as suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer in the mid-20th century, poses problems. By essentializing, in a way, what they call the cultural industry, they are unable to think about the relationship of this industry with what is not part of it and to grant a genuine positivity, an agency, to those outside this industry, especially in how their practices help reshape the industry itself. Power dynamics and complex positional games are erased in favor of an opposition between cultural industry and popular culture that fails to account for the shifting and ambiguous positions of agents in the field. The same individual can, during the day, work in the industry, perhaps in a large company, and at night engage in activities in this same field that far exceed this framework.

Bourdieu and the Concept of Field

I will now provide a few brief reminders of the meaning of this term in Bourdieu’s work. My remarks, necessarily incomplete, will be limited to what we need here.

As an unorthodoxe heir to Marx and Mauss, Bourdieu places the concept of exchange at the heart of his sociology. While the works of the former help us understand economic exchanges, they leave in the shadows other forms of exchanges and capital (cultural, social, symbolic, etc.). To put it simply, an individual’s position in the social field in general, or more specifically in a particular field, depends not only on their economic capital, but also on other factors such as their cultural resources, their relationships (the number and quality), and the recognition of these capitals by others within a given field. These various forms of capital can or cannot (and more or less directly) be converted into economic capital. This depends on the configuration of the considered field and its place in the global field of social relations.

Every cultural field is a more or less autonomous space of social relations where actors are in competition with one another. The core of this competition fundamentally concerns the very nature of the field: each producer claims – with or without success – legitimacy for their production. This means that every agent carries with them a particular conception of what this field should be. Therefore, within a given state of the field, we distinguish between legitimate or hegemonic forms of production and others: non-legitimate, marginal forms. When I write this paper, I myself occupy a certain position, certainly insignificant when taken individually, in the field of video game production; a position that carries a certain idea of what this field should be and is shaped by my own activity.

Finally, a field is more or less autonomous within society. The greater its autonomy, the more the criteria for legitimization within it will be independent of those of other adjacent fields or the overall society. Internal criteria are confined to recognition by the members of the field itself; external success criteria would be, for example, the number of sales, box office entries, external recognition, awards, etc. Complete autonomy of a field would mean its full independence from market laws; conversely, its total heteronomy would signify the disappearance of the field as such. Therefore, the greater or lesser autonomy of a field is itself a stake within the field in question.

It is important to emphasize that a field is a dynamic and conflicted reality. Dynamic because it is conflicted. Where each position is relative to the state of the field at a given time.

To return to Keogh’s work, we could say that the field of video game production is “a site of struggle where what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of what a video game creator is and to delimit the population of those allowed to take part in the fight to define the legitimate video game producer.” Keogh notes that the field of video game production appears to be in a paradoxical state: the cultural value of its productions is more or less recognized, but the cultural character of its production methods is not or is little recognized. Simply put: most individuals (even within this field!) tend to reduce video game production to its industry.

Keogh’s general thesis in his book, which must explain this state of affairs, is the following: what we call the video game industry ensures its dominance over the field of video game production by exploiting it while rendering its existence invisible.

Final conceptual point and addition by Keogh, borrowed from Roman Lobato and Julian Thomas (The Informal Media Economy): the distinction between formal and informal cultural activities. What interests Keogh in this conceptual pair is the ability to account for the internal mutations of a given cultural field through the reintegration of practices that originated in the non-integrated (informal) part of its economic circuit, by the integrated and dominant (formal) part. Lobato and Thomas take the example of the transformations of the music industry with the development of the internet. With the advent of MP3 files and the ability to exchange them online, a new, informal – non-economically integrated – way of consuming and distributing music appeared. Apple’s strategy with iTunes and the iPod was to reintegrate these practices into the realm of commercial practices.

The video game production field has undergone such important moments of formalization – these are the ones we now wish to focus on.

First Stage of Formalizing of the Video Game Production Field : the Atari Moment

Video games as we know them were born at the turn of the 1950s and 60s. Many agree that Spacewar!, developed by MIT students on the PDP-1, was the first true video game. This was in 1962. The PDP-1 was a machine produced in 53 units, primarily used in American universities. Each unit cost $120,000 at the time (equivalent to about $1.2 million today). In short, it was the American military research sector that provided universities with such equipment. The goal was to allow young people to train and experiment with these new machines to uncover their potential. That is why students handling these computers had significant freedom: they were expected to be explorers of the nascent potential of computing. Spacewar! was a groundbreaking object, a product of the hacker culture emerging at the time in the halls of a few American universities.

When we talk about hacker culture, particularly during this era, we are mainly referring to the pursuit of code efficiency in a framework of sharing and mutual inspiration among participants. It is crucial to understand that Spacewar! was a subversive creation. Throughout the decade, the game was improved, circulated between American universities, and adapted (and therefore reprogrammed) on various machines. Finally, starting in 1970, it traveled through ARPANET (the American military research packet-switched network and the ancestor of the Internet)—a doubling of its subversive nature!

While it is common today to recognize Spacewar! as the first video game in history, too little attention is paid to its very nature. Spacewar! is not just a cultural product; for ten years, it was living culture. Yes, there was the original game by Steve Russell, but for a decade, Spacewar! was also a practice: it was reprogrammed on other machines, had features added, its code was rethought, and it was shared again. As a result, Spacewar! was fundamentally an open cultural object. This was due to the very nature of the environment in which it was born.

Once we understand this, it is not surprising to learn that by the end of the decade, most of the students playing it were opposed to the Vietnam War, Nixon, and the American corporate world. Spacewar! was a piece of a puzzle that made academic computing a site of contestation, even as the American military deployed efforts to integrate these emerging technologies into the battlefield: Operation Igloo White, remote-controlled bombing from the B-52, and more.

Video games were born within the military-industrial research sector, but at the time, they were a highly informal practice. They repurposed the tools of war to create… games and social dissent.

The question then is: how was this nascent object and the culture surrounding it captured to turn it into an economically profitable entity? Beyond video games themselves, what unfolded from the late 1960s to the 1980s was the capture and transformation of hacker culture into what we might call tech culture. This meant transforming a culture and a set of oppositional practices into an economically integrated, lucrative, and even dominant sector. Figures like Bill Gates played a key role in this process. But here, we will focus solely on video games and their transformation into a commodity. One company played a central role: Atari.

Nolan Bushnell, along with Ted Dabney, first worked to develop a version of Spacewar! playable on what would become an arcade cabinet. This led to the creation of Computer Space, sold to Nutting Associates at the end of 1971. Following this, in early 1972, Bushnell founded Atari. The truth is that Computer Space was a failure. Essentially, the experience offered by Spacewar! was not suited to the arcade, which was played standing up in public spaces where the goal was to get consumers to keep inserting coins into the machine.

But in 1972, Bushnell saw a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey. The first home console, it connected to a television and allowed players to play cartridge-based games (it was marketed from 1972 to 1974). The specificity of the Odyssey lay in the fact that the programming was done directly in hardware on the cartridges (and not in software), which is why it is not always fully considered the first home console. It was also an early commercial attempt for video games, but Atari would truly take the lead in this area. Although not discussed here, it would be important to address the failures of video game commercialization. This would prevent a too-linear reading and show that this transformation was not without friction. Several works, including those by Mathieu Triclot, emphasize this point. Nonetheless, I will return to this somewhat indirectly later.

The Magnavox Odyssey included a tennis game similar to Tennis for Two from 1958. For Bushnell, this was a revelation. He tasked Allan Alcorn with developing Pong, which would become the first major arcade success. Magnavox sued Atari, but Alcorn added two brilliant innovations to the preexisting concept: the paddle was divided into seven zones, each deflecting the ball at a different angle, and the ball’s speed progressively increased. The longer the rally lasted, the faster the ball traveled, making it harder to return until it became impossible. Thus, games could no longer last indefinitely, and the game time was inherently limited by its mechanics. More importantly, each game ended abruptly at its most intense moment, leaving players with only one desire: to insert another coin.Compared to Spacewar!, Pong was much simpler in its mechanics. Players could only move their paddles vertically. When Pong began, players immediately understood what they needed and could do. Ultimately, the entire arcade industry became a set of variations on the principles invented by Pong.

Bushnell’s brilliance also lay in his management of Atari. To attract former students critical of American society and corporate work, he implemented a specific philosophy of work within his company: minimal bureaucracy, small development teams working on games they wanted to develop and rewarded for their successes, with alcohol and drugs freely available. Atari promised “play-as-work.” Bushnell’s approach was bold but successful (at least for a time): blending counterculture with corporate capitalism.

In 1975, Atari developed the Video Computer System (or VCS, later renamed VCS 2600). To bring the console to market, the company needed funds. Bushnell decided to sell Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million in 1976. This created tensions within the company: Warner Communications wanted to discipline the teams and work practices, while developers were long accustomed to more anarchic methods. Bushnell was sidelined, and production shifted radically toward rationalized profit-seeking. Atari then pursued a policy of erasing developer visibility and stopped rewarding them based on game success. This led to the creation of the first “Easter egg” in the medium’s history, in Adventure by Warren Robinett. Many team members resigned to form their own development studios. The most notable was Activision, which produced games for Atari consoles. This act was significant, as Atari only profited from software sales. Activision’s emergence marked the birth of third-party developers and publishers (those not manufacturing consoles). These newcomers quickly flooded the market, leading to the well-known 1983 crash, symbolized by Atari’s infamous E.T. game.

This historical overview is crucial. We first saw that video games originated as a subversive offshoot of the military-industrial research sector. Hacker culture at the time combined ingenuity, sharing, corporate work criticism, and anti-war opposition. Video games were thus born within another field of social production and as an informal activity within it.

Atari’s role is therefore central. Bushnell’s company played a dual role. First, it helped remove video games from the confined space of American universities. It played a key role in the emergence and development of the field of video game production. Video games became uprooted, taking on multiple meanings—paraphrasing Aristotle, video games could now “be said in many ways.” This multiplicity allowed the emergence of a distinct video game production field.

But this shift occurred through “capture,” borrowing the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari. The video game machine was captured and put at the service of capitalist enterprise. It represented a diversion of production flows. When some created games, it became an opportunity for others to profit, extract surplus value, and consolidate positions in this newly born field. The 1976 sale of Atari to Warner Communications was significant. It marked a higher level of capture and diversion of production flows (toward a global entertainment enterprise) and placed the video game industry under the direct dependency of larger corporations. The industry was assigned a specific and subordinate role: becoming a branch of the cultural entertainment industry. The video game machine was directly plugged into the circuits of capital circulation and production.

In short, the first time video games were revealed to the world, the first time they truly emerged from the depths of American university computer departments, the first time they spread beyond the closed circles of their developers, it was as a commodity—a transformation that changed the very type of games being produced. As a pioneer of arcades and later of mass-market home consoles, which it hoped to monopolize for game production, Atari might have falsely but uncontestedly declared: “Video games are me.” However, we must distinguish two phases here: Bushnell’s Atari embodied a hybridization that partially subverted corporate structures by integrating a foreign body. Then, in a second phase, we see the productive forces brought to heel by a second capture: that of Atari by a large entertainment corporation. This manifested concretely in a policy of invisibilizing and precarizing creators, as well as rationalized work reorganization to discipline labor. Only the company’s name—Atari, meaning “success” in Japanese—was meant to remain.